Imperial Encounters in Russian History – serie

Visual Texts, Ceremonial Texts, Texts of Exploration continues the work begun in Russian Monarchy: Representation and Rule, which analyzed the interplay between the symbolic representations of Russian monarchs and the legal and institutional instruments of their rule. The articles in this volume examine the texts that, through various media, revealed the myths and scenarios conveying the goals and ideals the monarchy sought to elevate before the elite of the empire and, later, the public at large. Russian monarchy inhabited a highly visual culture, comprising court ceremonials, parades, public festivities, and celebrations. It mobilized the arts through painting, prints, popular pictures (lubki), and even opera. This book examines that artistic culture, focusing on several aspects. Parts I and II analyze imagery and ceremony and their relation to the verbal texts that ascribed and defined their meanings. Part III details the way texts of exploration inspired the explorers who widened Russia’s engagement with the world. Parts IV and V address key texts of intellectual history and reflect on the scholarly and methodological influences on Wortman’s approach to history.

In this wide-ranging collection from Professor Steven L. Hoch of Washington State University, various facets of the life of Russia’s rural population are examined, from banking crises and infectious diseases to peasant rituals and land reform. In contrast to longstanding interpretations of the Russian peasantry, Hoch’s work emphasizes the role of social, epidemiological, and ecological forces in the formation of rural Russian society. Using sources infrequently considered by previous scholars, he assesses the impact of the broad economy on shaping the government polices of emancipation and land reform and the long-term consequences of these policies on peasant material well-being.

Situated on the intersection of comparative literary criticism, political history and theory, and cultural analysis, Terror and Pity: Aleksandr Sumarokov and the Theater of Power in Elizabethan Russia offers an in-depth reading of early Russian tragedy as a political genre. Imported to Russia by Aleksandr Sumarokov around 1750, tragedy reenacted and shaped the symbolic economy and the often disturbing historical experience of “absolutist” autocracy. Addressing half-forgotten texts and events, this study engages with literary and cultural theory from Walter Benjamin to Foucault and “new historicism” in order to contribute to a broader discussion of early modern “poetics of culture.”

This literary, cultural history examines imperial Russian tourism’s entanglement in the vexed issue of cosmopolitanism understood as receptiveness to the foreign and pitted against provinciality and nationalist anxiety about the allure and the influence of Western Europe. The study maps the shift from Enlightenment cosmopolitanism to Byronic cosmopolitanism with special attention to the art pilgrimage abroad. For typically middle-class Russians daunted by the cultural riches of the West, vacationing in the North Caucasus, Georgia, and the Crimea afforded the compensatory opportunity to play colonizer kings and queens in “Asia.” Drawing on Anna Karenina and other literary classics, travel writing, journalism, and guidebooks, the investigation engages with current debates in cosmopolitan studies, including the fuzzy paradigm of “colonial cosmopolitanism.”

Defining the Others, “them”, in relation to one’s own reference group, “us”, has been an essential phase in the formation of collective identities in any given country or region. In the case of Russia, the formulation of these binary definitions – sometimes taking a form of enemy images – can be traced all the way to medieval texts, in which religion represented the dividing line. Further, the ongoing expansion of the empire transferred numerous “external others” into internal minorities. The chapters of this edited volume examine the development and contexts of various images, perceptions and categories of the Others in Russia from the 16th century Muscovy to the collapse of the Russian empire.